TechCenter

DellTechCenter.com is a community for IT professionals that focuses on Data Center and End User Computing best practices. Here you can learn about and share knowledge about Dell products and solutions.

Cloudscaling just recently launched an engineering blog named Simplicity Scales: “This blog is about Cloudscaling’s engineers, engineering culture, and perspective on building elastic infrastructure clouds that don’t suck.” (Randy Bias, Cloudscaling). Below an overview over the first posts at the Simplicity Scales blog:

Rafael: Can you introduce yourself, Eric? What are you doing? Who are you?

Eric: I'm a Principal Engineer at Cloudscaling. I have been at Cloudscaling for two years now, and I am an active developer and participant in the OpenStack community. I believe I have been - at least for the last 12 months - the second highest contributor to the Oslo shared library project within OpenStack. Also, I've been contributing to the Simplicity Scales blog.

Rafael: Tell us about the Simplicity Scales blog.

Eric: Simplicity Scales blog was set up to provide an outlet for Cloudscaling engineers to express their thoughts and views to the world and to allow them to show some of the cool things that they're working on. The name comes from the idea that simple, loosely coupled systems are more scalable and fault tolerant than complex, tightly coupled ones. Simplicity Scales reflects our philosophy of building cloud and product design.

Rafael: Can you give some examples?

Eric: Sure. Presently I put out a post about the ZeroMQ work that I've been doing. That includes mostly the things that I did in Grizzly; it wrapped up this latest development cycle so that there was sort of a change log for that work that people could go and reference. One of the topics we will talk about is the Python 3 compatibility theme. That's an effort that I'm personally working on. Also, we are going to talk about service inventory and health in OpenStack and how to have awareness of the hosts that are in there.

Rafael: Do you plan to expand the author base to non-Cloudscaling engineers?

Eric: At this time we only have plans for Cloudscaling engineers.

Rafael: I noticed that you barely have any Cloudscaling branding at the Simplicity Scales blog. Why?

Eric: The idea is to present the engineers as themselves. These are Cloudscaling engineers, but these are not necessarily the thoughts and opinions of Cloudscaling. That’s one of the biggest differences between the Simplicity Scales blog and the Cloudscaling company blog. So, at Simplicity Scale we can allow ourselves some more free range.

Rafael: Can you give examples of topics where you deviate from Cloudscaling’s view?

Eric: Sure. I'm working on a post regarding running OpenStack Nova on a Raspberry Pi (laughs). This is something that Cloudscaling is not looking to actually do. It’s something I did for fun, and I just thought: “Hey, it would be kind of neat to let people know if you were to do this - for whatever reason - what it actually looks like.” And in no way this relates to what's being done at Cloudscaling.

Rafael: Thank you very much, Eric. I am looking forward to read more at the Simplicity Scales blog.